How To Make Screencasts On The XO

When trying to show others how to use the XO, a lot of times we want to communicate instructional or performance information. Generating a screencast would be helpful. It would be really nice to demonstrate different window managers running on the XO with something more than just a screenshot, for example.

With all that in mind, I investigated some Linux screencasting methods. On this site, I found a method that works and is pretty cool. Using vnc2swf, a swf file screencast can be generated that is easily embedded in a webpage.

Below is an example. The window manager running in the screencast is blackbox.

If you want to use vnc2swf to do some screencasts on your own OLPC, instructions are listed out below. These instructions could actually be applied to any Fedora distribution.

First, the installation. You should do these as root, or using sudo.

  1. Get xvnc. 
    # yum install vnc-server.i386
  2. Get make if you don’t already have it. 
    # yum install make.i386
  3. Get vnc2swf. After you download and extract it you will need to build it with make. Download the “tar.gz” from here: http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
  4. Get a bunch of other prerequisite packages that you might not already have. If you don’t install them, vnc2swf will complain. 
    # yum install tkinter.1386 tk.i386 tcl.i386

You finished the installion, great. Now, the usage. All of these commands you can run as a regular user. Warm up your fingers for a lot of alt-tabbing.

  1. Run vncserver. 
    $ vncserver -geometry 640x480 :1
  2. Run vncviewer. 
    $ vncviewer localhost:1
  3. Now, run pyvnc2swf. Click on the start button when you are ready to record your award winning screencast. 
    $ python vnc2swf.py -t video -o test.swf :1
  4. Now type something awesome in your vncviewer window.
  5. Finally, you have to format the swf for viewing. 
    $ python edit.py -o awesome.swf test.swf

Now you will have two new files: awesome.html and awesome.swf. If you’ve installed Opera or Firefox, you can open up awesome.html to view your work.

$ firefox awesome.html

I embedded awesome.swf for the above screencast. If you want to change the window manager that vncserver runs, you can edit the ~/.vnc/xstartup file. Change the last line from

twm &

to whatever window manager you want to use, e.g.

blackbox &

or

fluxbox &

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Level 2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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